Marine Le Penpraised Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as she met with the leaders of Europe’s hard-Right in Germany on Saturday to forge what they hope will be a new continent-wide movement.

“Brexit was the first real blow to the old order,” Ms Le Pen, a French presidential hopeful, told a small but adoring audience of Germans. “We are here to bear witness to the end of one world and the birth of another.”

Billed as an “alternative European summit”, the meeting brought Ms Le Pen of the Front National, Geert Wilders, whose Freedom Party (PVV) is leading polls in the Netherlands ahead of March’s elections, and Frauke Petry, the leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, together on the same stage for the first time.

“Yesterday a new America, today a new Europe,” Mr Wilders said. “The people of the West are awakening. They are throwing off the yoke of political correctness. This will be the year of the people, of liberation, the year of the patriotic spring.”

The liberation they were talking about was from what Ms Le Pen called the “tyranny” of the EU in its current form. Speaker after speaker invoked Brexit.

Brexit would “set the dominos falling across Europe,” Ms Le Pen said. But the new European movement they were here to cement is much further-Right than most Brexit campaigners in the UK would be likely to endorse.

The meeting was hosted by the AfD, one of whose most prominent members last week called for Germany to stop feeling guilt over its Nazi past and described the national Holocaust Memorial as a “monument of shame”.

One of the speakers was Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Northern League, who has spoken publicly of his admiration for Benito Mussolini.

Anti-Islam Dutch MP Geert Wilders found guilty of hate speech

01:08

The meeting was held under the umbrella of Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF), a grouping in the European parliament. It encompasses Ms Le Pen, who opposes French membership of Nato and agrees with Mr Trump that it is “obsolete”; and Mr Wilders, who has called for the Koran to be banned in the Netherlands.

In the wake of Mr Trump’s election, they believe that 2017 is the year they will overturn the European political order.

Mr Wilders, who spoke of a “patriotic awakening” and a “patriotic spring”, had clearly picked up on Mr Trump’s inaugural address, and a banner proclaimed 2017 “the year of the patriots”.

Demonstrators holding placards with the inscriptions in French "Egalite", "Liberte" and "Fraternite" (equality, freedom and fraternity) protest against a meeting of the main leaders of Europe's populist and far-right parties in Koblenz, western GermanyCredit:
SUSANN PRAUTSCH/AFP/Getty Images

The whole event was clearly modelled on a Trump rally, down to the leaders’ choreographed entrance to a sort of electronic folk music, and the placards emblazoned with their names that were handed out for the audience to wave.

But it lacked a little of Mr Trump’s slickness. The soundtrack featured what sounded supiciously like an Islamic muezzin of the sort most of the parties represented want to ban.

And the big entrance went wrong when a party apparatchik cut the music mid-flow to make an announcement. Nor, at least in Germany, did they manage to attract the sort of crowds Mr Trump’s campaign did.

The organisers claimed attendance of 1,000, but they didn’t manage to fill the hall. Delegates were outnumbered not only by the 3,000 protesters outside, but also by the 2,000 police officers assigned to keep the two sides apart.

Marine Le Pen praises Theresa May's Brexit plan

00:53

Not that it dampened spirits in the hall, where delegates chanted “Merkel must go” and booed like a pantomime audience every time the German chancellor’s name was mentioned.

The event was clearly designed for television cameras as the organiser, Markus Pretzell of the AfD, gave away when he boasted in his speech that 350 journalists had applied for accreditation— despite a highly publicised ban on some of the biggest German media organisations.

There were shades of the more sinister side to some of Mr Trump’s rallies when Mr Pretzell singled out a well-known German journalist by name and egged the audience on to boo him.

The parties involved are united against the EU and immigration - Ms Le Pen called Mrs Merkel’s refugee policy a “catastrophe” - but other issues divide them.

Frauke Petry (AfD) and Marine Le Pen (French Front National) speak to the media during a conference of European right-wing parties on January 21, 2017 in Koblenz, GermanyCredit:
Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images

“I am not saying every country must quit the Euro,” Ms Le Pen said. “That is a sovereign choice.” The AfD’s official policy is a little different: it wants France expelled from the single currency whether they like it or not.

“It doesn’t matter one bit that our policies are different,” Ms Le Pen said. “The whole point is that we don’t need one policy for all.” In the hall, the organisers had hung the flags of several European countries that were not represented at the event, including Norway which is not even in the EU.

Janice Atkinson, the sole British representative, used the summit to make a bizarre pitch for a role as go-between for Theresa May if Ms Le Pen is elected French president.

“I’m happy to do a Farage and open the doors to the Elysee Palace,” Ms Atkinson, who joined the ENF after she was expelled from Ukip over expenses claims, said.

Marine Le Pen in 90 seconds

01:38

Outside prostestors, who included Sigmar Gabriel, the German vice-chancellor, sang the EU anthem, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, accompanied by members of the local philharmonic orchestra.

Rival demonstrators put up statues of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin for some reason.

Inside the conference hall, Mr Wilders was confident his revolution would not be stopped.

“The patriotic spring we spoke about last year has not stopped but has accelerated,” he told journalists. “Even if we do not win this year’s elections, it doesn't matter, The genie will not go back into the bottle, whether you like it or not.”